The Lost Boys of Montauk: The True Story of the Wind Blown, Four Men Who Vanished at Sea, and the Survivors They Left Behind by Amanda M. Fairbanks

Author:Amanda M. Fairbanks [Fairbanks, Amanda M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781982103231
Google: rXcrEAAAQBAJ
Published: 2021-05-25T04:44:40+00:00

But Mike Stedman never sent an e-mail. In 1984, e-mail didn’t exist. He was the first of the fifteen original Choppess to die. His shoulders never grew hunched. His belly never sagged. His full head of sun-kissed hair never thinned or turned gray. He never got divorced. Among the Choppess, Mike will forever remain the bare-chested, athletic young man who was taken down in the prime of life.

All of the Choppess I was able to track down remembered exactly where they were when they got the call that Mike Stedman was lost at sea. On March 29, 1984, Steve Rosen was sitting at his desk in Manhattan at E.F. Hutton & Company, the brokerage firm, where he worked as a bond analyst, when Walter Vogt, a member of the Choppess and one of Mike’s closest childhood friends, called to tell him the news. The two men sat in stunned silence on the drive out to Montauk, where they soon linked up with search crews looking for the missing foursome.

Mark Vedder, who died of heart disease in the spring of 2018, was the second of the Choppess to go. He and his three brothers grew up alongside the Stedmans. Mark was one of Mike’s closest childhood friends, dating back to their days at North Side Elementary School. The pair called themselves the M&M’s. “He was knock-your-socks-off California surfer-dude material,” Cathy Vedder, Mark’s widow, said of Mike. “He was sweet, nice, kind, adorable, and hunky.”

Some of the Choppess made an early pact not to leave Long Island. Mark Vedder was among the first to test his wings. Shortly after high school graduation, he left the island for college and eventually received a PhD in physics. Mark could take anything apart and put it back together again. As a wedding present for Mike and Mary—Mike was the first among the band of brothers to get married—Mark found a broken washer and dryer, repaired both units, strapped them to the top of a friend’s van, and drove them out to the couple’s first apartment in Montauk.

In all their years together, Cathy saw her husband cry on just three occasions. The first was when Mike vanished in 1984. Cathy and Mark had been together for about a decade by then, and Cathy was on tenterhooks, not knowing how he would ever make peace with the sudden death of his closest childhood friend.

Mark stayed silent. He never said a word. A few days after getting the news, he went out to the back of their house in Manalapan, New Jersey, and, using a rototiller, dug up a half acre of land. He transformed half of it into a rose garden, and the other half into a vegetable garden. Cathy described it as “a silent act of pure male physical strength.”

Cathy and Mark named their second child, a son, Michael. When the movie version of The Perfect Storm came out, it provided them with some measure of relief. The film offered Mark a visual representation of what may have happened to his childhood friend.

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